Qantas still finalising Outlook shift

news The nation’s largest airline Qantas has revealed that it’s still in the process of migrating its corporate email platform off IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino platform and onto Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange system, with the rollout now into its fourth year.

The airline first confirmed it would migrate onto Outlook/Exchange in February 2010. At the time, Qantas’ executive manager of corporate services and technology David Hall said the process of migrating to Exchange had already begun, with piloting underway across the airline’s executive team. “Subject to satisfactory piloting, we anticipate the migration to be substantially completed by the end of the year,” the executive added. At that stage it was expected that around 20,000 staff would be migrated to the Microsoft platform.

Qantas was also be consolidating “a large number” of Lotus Notes applications and databases as part of its drive to “standardise, reduce and simplify” the number of business applications and tools it used.

In a statement today, the airline said the transition from Notes for individual users was completed in 2012, with its corporate employees now using Outlook. However, the migration of its shared mailboxes and distribution lists was still being finalised, and now due to be complete by the end of this year. Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu is believed to be working with the airline on the project.

Not all of Qantas’ employees will be migrated to Outlook, however. The airline announced in July 2012 that some of its staff would instead be moved onto Microsoft’s Office 365 package, including email provided on a software-as-a-service basis. At the time, iTNews reported that the cloud version of Microsoft’s suite was particularly targeted at the airline’s 11,000 cabin crew roster.

In the airline’s statement today, it described the Office 365 migration as “a separate but parallel project”. “Parts of the Microsoft package have already been introduced, such as cloud email for QantasLink crew, while Qantas’ new intranet will be hosted on SharePoint when it’s introduced later this year,” the airline said.

Qantas’ migration mirrors moves at its low-cost brand Jetstar, which announced in July 2011 that it would keep most of its head office staff on Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform, but shift about 2,200 staff onto Google’s Apps alternative, which features as its core the Gmail email service.

Part of Qantas’ rationale for the shift to Office 365 is likely to have been the nature of its workforce, much of which has active duties on aircraft and does not actively use desktop PCs or laptops as much as the more office-based workforces of major government departments and banks. This fact had already appeared to have had a significant effect on the technology buying practices of Australian airlines.

In February 2010, for example, analyst firm Longhaus revealed that Qantas had made a similar decision some time before that to avoid setting up dedicated email accounts for some staff such as flight attendants. Longhaus managing director Peter Carr said at the time, the flight attendants simply provided Qantas’ HR staff with their own personal email address — “Hotmail or Gmail or something like that”. They were then paid an annual fee for their professional use of personal technology.

The reason this system worked, according to Carr, is the low volume of official company email Qantas flight attendants need to deal with — just work schedules and so on. Most other official company communications could go through the airline’s unions. Effectively, Qantas had already outsourced part of its corporate email platform to Hotmail.

It’s a similar situation with many Australian universities, which have already deployed Office 365 or Google’s rival Apps platform to this class of so-called ‘light’ or ‘edge’ users — in the education sector, this would be students.

opinion/analysis
So what’s going on here? Why is this Qantas collaboration platform migration taking so long? Three years is a little long for a project which many would consider fundamental IT infrastructure.

Most likely, in my opinion, it’s due to the nature of Lotus Notes/Domino. Over the years the IBM platform became, for many organisations, much more than a simple collaboration platform, and morphed into an all-encompassing development base which fuelled the creation of many complex corporate applications. Those bespoke applications are gradually being wound back at major companies like Qantas in favour of standard out of the box packages, however, like spaghetti, their tentacles tend to reach everywhere. You can see this at Qantas — it’s apparent that the core email and likely unified communications functionality has been migrated successfully to Outlook/Exchange, but that the airline is still working on other subsidiary functions that may be more difficult to unpick.

15 COMMENTS

It’s not that Notes “morphed into an all-encompassing development base”, Renai. That’s what it was designed to do pretty much from the start of its existence, and get this: it’s the reason why many companies went with it in the first place. Sadly, these days the product is more associated with email, which was very much a secondary consideration for it in the beginning. (A fact that became painfully obvious if you’ve ever tried to use one of the earlier versions of Notes email!)

What typically happens is your new CIO comes in and, not knowing anything about technology (too busy working on his golf handicap) he sees Domino everywhere and can’t understand why it’s all pervasive when “it’s only email”. So, he decides to replace it with Outlook, the only program he ever learned to operate, and you end up with messes like Qantas.

As for “consolidating” its large number of applications, that means one of two things. Either you get rid of them and go without or you rewrite them from scratch in something else. Microsoft and its partners like to say you replacing a Domino app is merely a matter of throwing a switch in Sharepoint, but that’s total bollocks. These are very likely bespoke applications and it takes time and money to redo them.

Four years (and counting) isn’t really long time for “migrations” like this. In truth, it will take them another five years at least, maybe longer. And what really will they have gained at the end of it?

Good post. What will they have gained? They will have escaped one vendor lock-in, at considerable cost and disruption, and loss of home-grown productivity tools, and replaced it with another, much tighter vendor lock-in. But they’ll never have to worry about escaping from that!

What anyone who drinks the MS kool-aid doesn’t realise is that migrating Notes/Domino databases to SharePoint is a recipe for headaches and ulcers.
It will easily take you 4 to 5 times as long to do, and you can expect to lose significant chucks of functionality because SP just can’t support it.

SharePoint is a glorified document share and content management system.

I worked on a similar sized project a few years ago (it was Domino R8 to Exchange 2007). Again, the mailbox migration was done first with all users on Outlook, with the Lotus Notes Client also retained for Domino App access. SMTP connection was maintained between Domino and Exchange. Then, all Domino Apps were web-enabled, which allowed for the Lotus Notes Client to be removed from user workstations. Sharepoint was not deemed to be a viable option. This then allowed for a consolidation of the Domino environment, with a smaller footprint of Domino App Servers left behind.

I still get Domino migration consulting work from my website http://emailmigrations.com ,but am seeing fewer large migrations off Domino of late. Maybe there are not so many left, or maybe Domino customers are waiting for Exchange 2013 to mature before migrating ?

There are several, real business reasons why companies move from LotusNotes. 1) reduce direct cost of infrastructure and support of the application, and 2) As part of move to Cloud computing – again cost benefits.

It would seem that BrownieBoy, Brad and Rob haven’t kept pace with migration tools as one no longer needs to ‘drink the MS KoolAid. Just use tools like CIMtrek which performs approx 85% of the application migration for you at the click of a button with some manual effort required to tidy up.

Can’t say I’ve ever heard of Cimtrek before, but tools such as theirs tend to promise a lot and deliver very little. At best, they can translate the very basic out-of-the-box templates that ship with Domino. Anything more complicated that that, such as the bespoke applications that I mentioned above will likely involve what Cimtrek calls “Post-Migration remedial effort”.

Check out the “Before and After” page of their site, and you’ll see what I mean:

It’s a simple document sharing template being taken from the Notes client to the wonderful world of the web. They don’t mention, of course, that you could achieve the exact same result by enabling http on the Domino server and sending the users a URL: about 30 seconds work.

Cimtrek’s “Why should I abandon the Notes/Domino application platform?” section is straight out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Reason 1: “There was a corporate decision to consolidate the collaboration applications on a single platform other than Lotus Notes/Domino.”

Got it? A prime reason for moving off the platform is that somebody has already decided to move off the platform. Hard to argue with logic like that.

If they moved off Notes mail after 2 years, my guess is it was around summer 2012 or so since the article does not explicitly state it, when the share price started climbing back up. Maybe it was all just markets and economy or some other influence, but the upheaval brought to a company that changes systems is always under discussed by the migrating vendor. But this type of effort still does not bring much benefit.

You still have email, you still have some servers and you still are with one vendor and in this case, as with many, you still have Domino apps which now work less efficiently possibly.

Lotus Domino applications are meant to be end to end company products that make life easier for companies. Trying to convert them is not ideal because what do you have? the same app, but deprecated because the Domino one still does more. It is usually cheaper to edit your existing enterprise app than start to create a new one.

Its always amusing to hear the quotes about the migration could have been easier if they had just used X or Y or Z. Qantas is a large respectable company. I am sure after 4 years, if there was an easy solution they would have explored those. The compelling evidence is that every time an organization with a large investment in Notes applications attempts a migration there does not seem to be a single case study published in which it all went well, on time, and on budget. All too many end up like this.

After using Lotus Notes for almost two decades, a few years ago I switched to working for a company that only used MS Outlook & Exchange. I looked forward seeing first hand what many people believed was a superior technology platform. What did I find instead, a buggy application that was slow to boot (with numerous plugins), had crappy Search capabilities and was so unstable that I now found the need to reboot my computer regularly, sometimes multiple times per day.
In all the years that I used Lotus Notes I could count the number of times that it went down on one hand.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Outlooks ease of use, but not at the expense of massive loss of functionality, productivity & reliability.
For those who would counter my comments with (it’s just a poor implantation of Microsoft technology), several months ago I moved to another job (also using Outlook/Exchange) & it’s no better, still buggy, unreliable & unproductive.

After using Lotus Notes for almost two decades, a few years ago I switched to working for a company that only used MS Outlook & Exchange. I looked forward seeing first hand what many people believed was a superior technology platform. What did I find instead, a buggy application that was slow to boot (with numerous plugins), had poor Search capabilities and was so unstable that I now found the need to reboot my computer regularly, sometimes multiple times per day.
In all the years that I used Lotus Notes I could count the number of times that it went down on one hand.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Outlooks ease of use, but not at the expense of massive loss of functionality, productivity & reliability.
For those who would counter my comments with (it’s just a poor implantation of Microsoft technology), several months ago I moved to another job (also using Outlook/Exchange) & it’s no better, still buggy, unreliable & unproductive.

Add to the list just about every large Notes migration done in Australia,

Defence probably has the record, they still use heaps of Domino. But add Caltex, DFAT, Centrelink, Westpac, etc. All in the same boat. All spent a ton of money swapping email and then keeping what they had.

Sounds like this stopped being a migration from Domino to Exchange a while ago, and now it is a migration from Domino to…….oh crap! Something that doesn’t exist yet, and wasn’t factored into the original, over-simplified plan.

All those pesky domino applications must still be delivering business value and competitive advantage, above and beyond what Qantas would get from a simple swap to ‘standard, out of the box packages’. If they weren’t, the migration would have been as simple and easy as the original consultant told Qantas it was going to be.

I think these stories are always a victory for somebody who can over-simplify the situation in front of senior management and get the project kicked off. Everybody else loses.

@Rennai You’re right in that the existing Notes applications are difficult to “un-pick”. If they were useless apps, they wouldn’t be an issue. Just turn it off and be done with it. But they can’t implies alot to me. migrating like-for-like functionality to something other than Notes is very hard because Microsoft’s stack has missing parts, Oracle Java is too tedious, and any other ERP solutions are too generic. The functionality gap that arises equates to alot of $$$ as well as risk.

Anyway, I don’t disagree with migrating mail for “low utilisation” users, and using gmail may actually be an applicable solution as it’s a commodity application anyway. But Notes real strength, (and IBM has now deliberately abandoned this message), is the Apps. It’s all about the Apps.

I think when David Hall realises how he has damned Qantas by this hybrid-bastardisation of the IT infrastructure with smatterings of “disappearing up his clacker” with system replacement projects. His time is running out once the rest of the board discovers he is a donkey for not doing a realistic and effective “AS-IS/TO-BE” analysis of the in-house systems . Once he moves on, then it will be interesting to see what comes next.

BTW You should ask AMP where they’re upto as well in their migration they started in 2010 (?)

Let’s face it though, Outlook is a fantastic product. Qantas will be very happy with their purchase!

Well done Qantas for committing.. Notes has been the bane of my existence for the past 4 years and the new one came too late.

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